After I stepped down from being a local councillor, I wondered if the problems I'd faced was everywhere. So I wrote to the other Councillor John Harts

To understand what’s wrong with local government, John Hart decided to interview John Hart, John Hart and John Hart.

Who’d be a councillor?

It’s a question I asked myself with increasing regularity, until poverty and pointlessness convinced me to step down from local government at the age of 34—decades before most councillors step up.

Being a councillor is like having a second spouse: Some days you look at your ward and think “you’re so beautiful and perfect, I can’t believe you chose me.” Others, you look at it and think “Aaargh! Why did I shackle myself to this idiot?!”

Who counsels the councillors?

At its heart, being a councillor means doing four things:

1. Advocating: Representing local residents and groups in their dealings with the council and other public bodies (often very personal, sometimes extremely harrowing, disproportionally related to dog poo, wheelie bins, and people homicidally angry because the council has somehow been unable to clear every last bit of snow from 4000 miles of roads before they’ve had their breakfast).

2. Scrutinising: Probing policies or performance of the council or other public bodies.

4. Responding: To caps lock demagogues on Facebook who swear blind that the council has eleventeen squillion pounds in the bank and is only making these cuts because the council leader (who gets his own Concorde by the way) has a perverse vendetta against one particular village.

Councillors are effectively volunteering to be the community piñata. P…

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